Restoring the Context of Interrupted Work with Desktop Thumbnails

Knowledge work is frequently interrupted. Interruptions enablecollaboration and bring timely information, but they disruptthe fragile context of ongoing activities. Computers, nowubiquitous in knowledge work, have improved in their abilityto track and restore digital context (documents and files), butthey do a poor job of helping users restore mental context: theideas, intentions, and motivations behind their work. Thumbnailimages are an efficient way to help computer users refinddocuments; we ask if they can also be used to restoremental context. We tested how three manipulations to thumbnailsof personal computer screenshots impact their ability tohelp viewers recognize past activities and recall accurate anddetailed context. In a 2-week study we found that thumbnailsof portions of the screen need to be larger than thumbnails ofthe entire screen for successful activity recognition and thatstatic screenshots prompted more accurate contextual recallthan animations.